"You look," he said once, glancing critically at her, "as if you had lived for centuries and had learned all the lessons life could teach."
She shook her head. "I have lived for centuries, so far as that goes," she said, "but of all the lessons I've really learned only one."
"And that is?"
"How little it all amounts to."
Again, as he studied her, he experienced an unpleasant little tremor. He felt at the same time an odd conviction that this woman had played a part all day, and that now, through fatigue and depression, she was tiring of her role and would cast it away, showing herself to him as she was. For some reason he did not want this. The face behind the mask, of which he was beginning to get a glimpse at intervals, was a face he feared he would not like. He shrank from it as a child shrinks from what it does not understand.
Much to his relief, she threw off the dark mood that seemed to threaten her, and at the play she was more human than she had been yet.
"Ah, that first act," she said, as the curtain fell on Peter Pan's flight through the window with the Darling Children—"that delicious first act! Of course Barrie can't keep it up—no one could. But the humor of it and the tenderness and the naivete! Only a grown-up with the heart of a child could really appreciate it."
"And you are that?" he asked, daringly. He knew she was not.
"Only for this half-hour," she smiled. "I may get critical at any moment and entirely out of touch."
She did not, however, and watching her indulgent appreciation of the little boys in Never Never Land, he unconsciously reflected that, after all, this must be the real woman. That other personality, some sudden disheartening side of which he got from time to time, was not his new friend who laughed like a young girl over the crocodile with the clock inside, and showed a sudden swift moisture in her brown eyes when the actress pleaded for the dying fairy. When the curtain fell on the last act, leaving Peter Pan alone with his twinkling fairy friends in his little home high among the trees, Alice Stansbury turned to her companion with the sudden change of expression he had learned to dread. The pupils of her eyes were strangely dilated, and she was evidently laboring under some suppressed excitement. She spoke to him curtly and coolly.